The bullet holes are still there. More than half a century after the night of May 15, 1970, the facade of Alexander Hall at Jackson State University bears the scars of over 460 rounds fired by state highway patrolmen in roughly thirty seconds. Two students -- Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, twenty-one, and James Earl Green, seventeen, a high school student who happened to be walking nearby -- were killed. Twelve others were wounded. The shooting came eleven days after the Kent State massacre in Ohio, which killed four students and convulsed the nation. But while Kent State became a defining image of the Vietnam era, the killings at Jackson State -- at a historically Black college, in Mississippi -- faded from the national conversation almost as quickly as the gunfire itself.
Lynch Street, which bisected the Jackson State campus, was named for John R. Lynch, a Black U.S. Representative during Reconstruction. By 1970, it had become a recurring flashpoint where Black and white Jackson residents collided. The road channeled white motorists through the heart of a Black campus, and confrontations were common. On the evening of Thursday, May 14, roughly a hundred students gathered along Lynch Street. Tensions had been building for days, fueled by the war, by the Kent State killings, and by a rumor -- later proved false -- that Charles Evers, the civil rights leader and brother of slain activist Medgar Evers, and his wife had been killed. A non-Jackson State student set a dump truck on fire. The police arrived in force.
At least 75 officers from the Jackson city police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol moved to control the crowd while firefighters extinguished the flames. After the fire crews left shortly before midnight, the officers advanced on a group of students gathered in front of Alexander Hall, a women's dormitory. At roughly 12:05 a.m. on May 15, the police opened fire on the building. Authorities later claimed they had spotted a sniper on an upper floor and that shots were coming from multiple directions. Students denied provoking the officers. The barrage lasted approximately thirty seconds. Forty state highway patrolmen fired shotguns from as close as thirty feet. Two city policemen and one state patrolman reported minor injuries from flying glass. Inside and around Alexander Hall, two young men lay dead and twelve people were wounded.
The President's Commission on Campus Unrest, also known as the Scranton Commission, investigated both the Kent State and Jackson State shootings. Its report called the police gunfire at Jackson State an "unreasonable, unjustified overreaction." Yet no officers were ever indicted. A federal grand jury investigation ended in December 1970 without charges. The national media, already saturated by Kent State coverage, gave Jackson State a fraction of the attention. The disparity became its own story: four white students killed at a predominantly white university in Ohio sparked weeks of protest and a Neil Young anthem, while two Black students killed at a historically Black college in Mississippi were largely forgotten outside the communities that mourned them.
Jackson State University eventually memorialized the site by naming it Gibbs-Green Plaza, a multi-level brick and concrete space on the eastern side of campus bordering Lynch Street and linking Alexander Hall to the University Green. A stone monument near the plaza honors Gibbs and Green. The damage to Alexander Hall's facade was deliberately preserved as a physical reminder. For fifty-one years, however, no formal public apology was issued. That changed at Jackson State's 2021 commencement ceremony, when Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and State Senator Hillman Terome Frazier delivered a public apology, pledging to "publicly atone for the sins of our past and proclaim a new identity of dignity, equity and justice." Gibbs and Green were awarded posthumous honorary doctorate degrees, accepted by their families. The bullet holes in Alexander Hall remain.
Located at 32.30N, 90.21W. Jackson State University campus is visible in western Jackson, Mississippi, with Alexander Hall and Gibbs-Green Plaza along the former Lynch Street corridor on the eastern edge of campus. Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport (KJAN) lies approximately 10 miles to the east. Hawkins Field (KHKS) is about 3 miles north of campus. The Pearl River runs east of the university, and the distinctive campus quad is identifiable from lower altitudes.